Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Cinema
Que o cinema se tenha tornado antes de mais nada uma mquina de contar estrias, eis o
que no tinha sido realmente previsto. Logo no incio do cinematgrafo, algumas
indicaes ou declaraes sugeriam o fato, verdade, mas pouco tinham a ver com o
desenvolvimento que o fenmeno tomaria posteriormente. O encontro do cinema com a
narratividade um grande fato que nada tinha de fatal, mas que tampouco ocasional:
um fato histrico e social, um fato de civilizao, um fato que por sua vez condiciona
a evoluo posterior do filme enquanto realidade semiolgica, um pouco de modo
indireto e global mas eficiente como as ocorrncias de lingstica
externa(conquistas, colonizaes, mudanas de lngua...) influenciam o
funcionamento interno dos idiomas. No reino do cinema, todos os gneros que no os
narrativos o documentrio, o filme tcnico etc. tornaram-se provncias marginais,
degraus por assim dizer, enquanto que o longa metragem de fico romanesca, apontava
de modo cada vez mais claro a via real da expresso flmica.
A preponderncia meramente numrica e social no o nico fator; vem fortalec-lo
uma considerao mais interna: os filmes no narrativos distinguem-se dos
verdadeiros filmes, basicamente, pela sua finalidade social e pelo contedo
substancial mais do que pelos processos de linguagem. As grandes figuras
fundamentais da semiologia do cinema montagem, movimento de cmera, escala dos
planos, relaes da imagem com a palavra, seqncias e outras unidades de grande
sintagmtica... so mais do que semelhantes nos pequenos filmes como nos
grandes. Nada indica que uma semiologia autnoma nos diversos gneros no
narrativos seja possvel seno como uma srie de anotaes descontnuas assinalando as
diferenas em relao aos filmes habituais. Abordar os filmes de fico portanto ir
mais depressa e mais direto ao cerne do problema. [pg. 113-4]
Tese celisa
MARQUS DE SADE
Letcia Fernochi
RF
Texto caderno
Podemos dizer que Sade foi um homem de seu tempo. Apenas para se ter idia,
durante o reinado de Lus XV, este soberano manifestou diversos comportamentos
libertinos, dedicando-se ao prazer pessoal e imediato, coisa que no era exceo
para a poca. Mas o que havia em Sade que o fez to maldito? Segundo Peixoto
(1979), Sade representava a crtica sobre a represso aos instintos vitais do
homem. No se pode esquecer que este autor tem um[pg.08] Texto caderno
Nos ritos secretos de Sade, os libertinos flagelam, estupram e castram suas vtimas,
depois devoram os corpos e bebem o sangue. Como sacerdotes astecas, vivissecam,
extraindo o corao vivo. Produto da elegante aristocracia francesa, Sade
primitiviza sua prpria cultura e a torna decadente. Mistura atos sexuais com
agresses e multilaes para mostrar a brutalidade latente do sexo. Como em
Freud, o instituto sexual amoral e egosta. Em Juliette (1797), respondendo
Julie de Rousseau, Sade diz da luxria: Ela exige, ela milita, ela tiraniza. Sexo
poder. Sexo e agresso fundem-se de tal modo que no apenas o sexo assassino,
mas o assassinato sexual. Uma mulher declara: O assassinato um ramo de
atividade ertica, uma de suas extravagncia. O ser humano s atinge o paroxismo
final do prazer atravs de um acesso de raiva. O orgasmo uma exploso de
violncia, uma espcie de fria, mostrando a inteno da natureza de que o
comportamento furioso. [pg. 223] Personas Sexuais Camille Paglia
Contra Cristo e Rousseau, Sade diz que a benevolncia e o que os tolos chamam
de humanidade nada tm a ver com a Natureza, mas so fruto da civilizao
do medo. [...] Sade descarta a caridade crist e a igualdade e fraternidade de
Rousseau como iluses sentimentais. No h obrigaes sociais ou morais para o
filsofo: Ele est s no universo. Devido sua concentrao romntica no ego, os
libertinos de Sade jamais permitem que o amor ou a amizade sobrevivam. A
lealdade um pacto temporrio entre conspiradores criminosos. [pg. 223]
Personas Sexuais Camille Paglia
Para provar que a benevolncia humana uma teoria utpica contraditada pela
realidade, Sade monta um catlogo de atrocidades praticadas por toda cultura na
histria, muitas vezes em nome da religio. [...] Surpreendentemente, a abolio da
lei civil e divina por Sade no conduz anarquia. Os libertinos estabelecem suas
prprias estruturas rigorosas, a hierarquia natural de fortes e fracos, senhores e
escravos. Quer na Associao dos Amigos do Crime em Juliette, que na vasta
Escola de Libertinagem de Cento e vinte dias de Sodoma, os libertinos de Sade se
organizam em unidades sociais autnomas. Emitem prospectos e estatutos,
projetam ambientes arquitetnicos, e arrebanham suas vtimas em classes e
subclasses erticas. Como colnias de formigas, secretam sistema. Essas coisas em
Sade vm do Iluminismo apolneo. Como sexualista dionisaco, ele abole a grande
cadeia do ser, mergulhando o homem no grande continuum da natureza, mas no
pode livrar-se do hierarquismo intelectual de sua poca. A identidade dos libertinos
precede seu agrupamento cooperativo para a devassido. A personalidade de Sade
dura e impermevel ou seja, apolnea. No h mistrios ou ambigidades,
porque nada deixado ao inconsciente, cujas mais perversas fantasias se esvaziam
na fria luz da conscincia. Em Sade, a personalidade apolnea mergulhada em
esgoto dionisaco, mas emerge limpa e intacta. [pg. 224] Personas Sexuais
Camille Paglia
Sade concebe papis e faz experincias com audcia romntica. Em Cento e vinte dias
de Sodoma, o presidente Curval explora outra variao: A fim de combinar incesto,
adultrio, sodomia e sacrilgio, ele enraba a filha casada com uma hstia. Sade
acrescenta ao seu ensopado afrontas ao sagrado. De novo: Um sodomita notrio, a fim
de cometer esse crime juntamente com os de incesto, assassinato, estupro, sacrilgio e
adultrio, primeiro enfia uma hstia no cu, depois faz-se enrabar pelo filho, estupra a
filha casada e mata a sobrinha. O orgiasta intelectual e contorcionista, um Laocoonte
enroscado em seus proliferantes desejos. [pg. 227] Personas Sexuais Camille Paglia
Sade substitui as relaes sociais por sexuais. [pg. 227] Personas Sexuais
Camille Paglia
Mas ele difere dos mais passivos romnticos ao fazer a identidade brotar da ao,
para libertino e vtima igualmente. Um origina o ato, o outro sofre-o. O contexto de
identidade sadiana dramatrgico. H sempre tableauxe espetculos
dramticos de corpos entrelaados, dos quais as pessoas fazem espirituosos
julgamentos estticos. A teatralidade berrante no sadomasoquismo moderno, com
seus trajes, adereos e roteiros. O sadomasoquismo, como sugeri, um sintoma de
sede cultural de hierarquia. A religio mal dirigida quando relaxa seu ritualismo.
A imaginao anseia por subordinao, e ir busc-la em outra parte. Sade, um
filsofo que expulsa a Igreja de seu universo, termina fazendo do sexo uma nova
religio. Seu prdigo ritualismo sexual dramatiza o hierarquismo natural do sexo -
um hierarquismo que nada tem a ver com o costume social, pois as mulheres
podem ser senhoras e os homens escravos. O sadomasoquismo friamente formal,
uma expresso condensada da estrutura biolgica da experincia sexual. Em todo
orgasmo h dominao ou rendio, sempre abertas aos dois sexos,em grupos,
pares ou sozinhos. Richard Tristman me disse: Toda sexualidade implica certo
grau de teatro. O sexo contm um elemento do abstrato e transpersonal, que s o
sadomasoquismo reconhece sem rodeios. Tristman continuou: Todas as relaes
sexuais envolvem relaes de dominao. O desejo de igualdade nas mulheres
provavelmente uma manifestao atenuada do desejo de dominar. Saudado nos
anos 60 como um libertador sexual, Sade na verdade o mais erudito
documentador da sujeio do sexo a ordens hierrquicas. [pg. 229] Personas
Sexuais Camille Paglia
Os libertinos so como imperadores romanos em riqueza e poder, duas coisas,
como observa Sade, que do absoluto controle sexual sobre outros. Como Blake,
Sade exalta a imaginao romntica, fonte de desejo e portanto de realizao: O
fogo da imaginao deve acender a fornalha dos sentidos. A imaginao livre pode
forjar, tecer, criar novas fantasias. Juliette declara: A imaginao o nico
bero onde nascem os prazeres. Sem ela, tudo que resta o ato fsico, chato,
grosseiro e brutal. A maior zona ergena de Sade a mente. Suas obras, como as
de Genet, so sonhos auto-erticos de priso criando um perverso universo de
novas sensaes e sexos. Sade o cosmognico Khepera, renovando eternamente o
seu desejo. A masturbao seu princpio motivador. [pg. 229] Personas Sexuais
Camille Paglia
O diretor de teatro de 120 dias de Sodoma homem, mas na obra de Sade como
um todo as mulheres no sofrem mais abusos que os homens. Sade e Blake
concedem s mulheres a liberdade sexual dos homens. Embora cultue suas grandes
libertinas, ele detesta a mulher procriativa. Mulheres grvidas so torturadas,
foradas a abortar, ou esmagadas juntas em rodas de ferro. [pg. 230] Personas
Sexuais Camille Paglia
Sade acha o corpo feminino menos bonito que o masculino. Comparem um homem
e uma mulher nus: Sero obrigados a concluir que a mulher simplesmente o
homem numa forma extraordinariamente degradada. Simone de Beauvoir e
Barthes relacionam a desvalorizao do corpo feminino por Sade sua fome
homossexual de sodomia. Mas o simbolismo sexual maior que os hbitos
privados. A sodomia o protesto racional de Sade contra a natureza criadora
incansavelmente abundante. [...]A sodomia imaginada como entrada ritual no
submundo, simbolizado pelas entranhas do homem. [pg. 232] Personas Sexuais
Camille Paglia
Jane Harrison diz: O homem no pode escapar do fato de que nasceu da mulher, mas
pode, e se for sbio o far assim que chegar virilidade, executar cerimnias de
libertao e purgao. A obsessiva sodomia de Sade um ritual de libertao para fugir
ao poder materno. [pg. 232] Personas Sexuais Camille Paglia
Por isso Sade alternadamente celebra e vilifica a mulher. D a suas libertinas
intelectuais outra prerrogativa masculina, desafiando a realidade: a paixo pelas
atrocidades sexuais. [pg. 233] Personas Sexuais Camille Paglia
Baudelaire e Swinburne enfatizam sua dvida com Sade, que prefigura de vrias formas
a sensibilidade decadente. Ele descobre beleza no horrvel e revoltante. Como os
imperadores romanos, justape artificialidade e sofistica com barbarismo ctnico.
Seus libertinos so indiferentes a tudo que simples e lugar-comum, uma expresso
decadentista. Os libertinos esto sempre auto-emparedados, uma claustrofobia
decadentista. [pg. 233] Personas Sexuais Camille Paglia
Livro revela...
Segundo Eliane, Sade acabou preso, passando nada menos que 39 anos, com algumas
interrupes, nos presdios e manicmios judiciais. Sade foi um homem que no
acreditava em Deus. Para ele, s existia o corpo, as sensaes do corpo e tudo aquilo
que o corpo do libertino pode proporcionar em termos de prazer, sem a preocupao de
causar ou no algum mal ao outro. Da que a filosofia de vida do Marqus de Sade vai
pregar a violncia sexual, a dor no corpo do parceiro. O primeiro livro de Sade, Os 120
dias de Sodoma, ainda sem traduo no Brasil, conta a histria dos quatro maiores
libertinos da Frana, que se encontram num castelo, no alto de uma montanha.
Levam para l 50 sditos, desde lindas ninfetas at homens e mulheres velhos,
caquticos, com os corpos deformados, que vo fazer uma srie de experincias
sexuais durante 120 dias. Com essa obra, Sade se props a apresentar o que
denominou de as 600 paixes sexuais que existem no mundo, divididas em
quatro partes: as simples, as complexas, as criminosas e as assassinas.
No entanto, ela acentua que a literatura de Sade, apesar de toda a crueldade e violncia
sexual, est longe de ser pornogrfica. Todo autor que desvenda algum elemento que
faz parte de nossa humanidade est falando alguma coisa importante. claro que seria
formidvel se todos eles s falassem sobre o lado bom do homem, opina a professora.
Sade talvez foi o escritor que tenha mais falado de crueldade e violncia em seus textos.
Mas com certeza no foi ele quem as inventou. A crueldade est desde sempre na cena
real e histria da humanidade.
claro que no se pode condenar, nem edulcorar livros como os de Sade, mas afirmar
seu valor transgressivo como forma de conhecimento, prega a professora Eliane. .
PASOLINI
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A Mad Dream
Pier Paolo Pasolini's own notes on him film Sal
Pasolini was trenchant when discussing Sal. Below are two pieces in which he
introduces and then annotates his film, paying particular attention to its relationship to
Sade's novel and to Italian fascism. The first, a 'Foreword', was written in 1974, a few
months before filming began. The date of the second is unclear, but appears to have
been written later. Both pieces are reproduced from an English-language press book (in
the collection of James Ferman) issued, it seems, in Italy to accompany the release of
the film. (Both pieces have been lightly edited.) There is no record of any translator in
the press book.
Foreword
This film is a cinematographic transposition of Sade's novel The 120 Days of Sodom. I
should like to say that I have been absolutely faithful to the psychology of the characters
and their actions, and that I have added nothing of my own. Even the structure of the
story line is identical, although obviously it is very synthetised. To make this synthesis I
resorted to an idea Sade certainly had in mind - Dante's Inferno. I was thus able to
reduce in a Dantesque way certain deeds, certain speeches, certain days from the whole
immense catalogue of Sade. There is a kind of 'Anti-Inferno' (the Antechamber of Hell)
followed by three infernal 'Circles': 'The Circle of Madness'; 'The Circle of Shit', and
'The Circle of Blood'. Consequently, the Story-Tellers who, in Sade's novel, are four, are
three in my film, the fourth having become a virtuoso - she accompanies the tales of the
three others on the piano.
Despite my absolute fidelity to Sade's text, I have however introduced an absolutely
new element: the action instead of taking place in eighteenth-century France, takes
place practically in our own time, in Sal, around 1944, to be exact.
This means that the entire film with its unheard-of atrocities which are almost
unmentionable, is presented as an immense sadistic metaphor of what was the Nazi-
Fascist 'dissociation' from its 'crimes against humanity'. Curval, Blangis, Durcet, the
Bishop - Sade's characters (who are clearly SS men in civilian dress) behave exactly
with their victims as the Nazi-Fascists did with theirs. They considered them as objects
and destroyed automatically all possibility of human relationship with them.
This does not mean that I make all that explicit in the film. No, I repeat again, I have not
added a single word to what the characters in Sade have to say nor have I added a single
detail to the acts they commit. The only points of reference to the 20th century are the
way they dress, comport themselves, and the houses in which they live.
Naturally there is some disproportion between the four protagonists of Sade turned into
Nazi-Fascists and actual Nazi-Fascists who are historically true. There are differences in
psychology and ideology. Differences and also some incoherence. But this accentuates
the visionary mood, the unreal nightmare quality of the film. This film is a mad dream,
which does not explain what happened in the world during the 40s. A dream which is all
the more logical in its whole when it's the least in its details.
In addition to being anarchic what best characterises power - any power - is its natural
capacity to turn human bodies into objects. Nazi-Fascist repression excelled in this.
Another link with Sade's work is the acceptance/non-acceptance of the philosophy and
culture of the period. Just as Sade's protagonists accepted the method - at least mental or
linguistic - of the philosophy of the Enlightened Age without accepting all the reality
which produced it, so do those of the Fascist Republic accept Fascist ideology beyond
all reality. Their language is in fact their comportment (exactly like the Sade
protagonists) and the language of their comportment obeys rules which are much more
complex and profound than those of an ideology. The vocabulary of torture has only a
formal relation with the ideological reasons which drive men to torture. Nonetheless
with the characters in my film, although what counts is their sub-verbal language, their
words also have a great importance. Besides their verbiage is rather wordy. But such
wordy verbiage is important in two senses: firstly it is part of the presentation, being a
'text' of Sade's, that is being what the characters think of themselves and what they do;
and, secondly, it is part of the ideology of the film, given that the characters who quote
anachronistically Klossowsky and Blanchot are also called upon to give the message I
have established and organised for this film: anarchy of power, inexistence of history,
circularity (non-psychological not even in the psychoanalytic sense) between
executioners and victims, an institution anterior to a reality which can only be economic
(the rest, that is, the superstructure, being a dream or a nightmare).
'Veiled' reconstruction of Nazi ceremonial ways (its nudity, its military simplicity at the
same time decadent, its ostentations and icy vitality, its discipline functioning like an
artificial harmony between authority and obedience, etc.
Obsessive accumulation to the point of excess of sadistic ritualistic and organised deeds;
sometimes also given a brutal, spontaneous character.
Ironic corrective to all this through a humour which may explode suddenly in details of
a sinister and admitted comic nature. Thanks to which suddenly everything vacillates
and is presented as not true and not crude, exactly because of the theatrical satanism of
self-awareness itself. It is in this sense that the direction will be expressed in the editing.
It is there that will be produced the mix between the serious and the impossibility of
being serious, between a sinister, bloody Thanatos and curate Bauba (Bauba was a
Greek divinity of liberating laughter or better: obscene and liberating laughter).
In every shot it can be said I set myself the problem of driving the spectator to feeling
intolerant and immediately afterwards relieving him of that feeling.
http://zakka.dk/euroscreenwriters/interviews/pier_paolo_pasolini.htm
http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/salo/
Sal or The 120 Days of Sodom
"Pier Paolo Pasolini did not live to see the storms of controversy and scandal that were
whipped up around Sal or The 120 Days of Sodom (Sal o le 120 giornate di Sodoma,
1975), his adaptation of the Marquis de Sade. Until recently, the uncut film had never
received a certification in the UK and is banned in a number of other countries.
However, the BBFC have now - for the first time - granted an 18 certificate to the uncut
version, for both theatrical screenings and for a DVD / VHS release.
In advance of the BBFC's decision, on 29 and 30 September 2000, the bfi and ICA held
a conference, at which Sal was screened, in order to debate the issues the film raises. Is
it a credible study of Italian fascism? Do its infamous scenes of torture and sexual
violence amount to more than spectacle or pornography? These questions and others
were discussed at the ICA by a range of academics, writers and artists, among them Neil
Bartlett, Jake Chapman, Jenny Diski, former director of the BBFC James Ferman, and
Gary Indiana, author of a book on Sal in the bfi Modern Classics series.
To prepare the ground for the conference and to begin to put Sal in context, this site
makes available detailed information about the film's censorship history; some
comments made by Pasolini himself as well as a contemporary analysis of the film;
extracts from Gary Indiana's book and an interview with him.
The material here has been compiled by Rob White, editor of the bfi Modern Classics
series and co-organiser of the Sal conference. He would like to record his gratitude to
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Craig Lapper of the BBFC for responses to queries, and
particularly to James Ferman who most generously made his archives available for this
project.
A Mad Dream
Pasolini was trenchant when discussing Sal. Below are two pieces in which he
introduces and then annotates his film, paying particular attention to its relationship to
Sade's novel and to Italian fascism. The first, a 'Foreword', was written in 1974, a few
months before filming began. The date of the second is unclear, but appears to have
been written later. Both pieces are reproduced from an English-language press book (in
the collection of James Ferman) issued, it seems, in Italy to accompany the release of
the film. (Both pieces have been lightly edited.) There is no record of any translator in
the press book.
Foreword
This film is a cinematographic transposition of Sade's novel The 120 Days of Sodom. I
should like to say that I have been absolutely faithful to the psychology of the characters
and their actions, and that I have added nothing of my own. Even the structure of the
story line is identical, although obviously it is very synthetised. To make this synthesis I
resorted to an idea Sade certainly had in mind - Dante's Inferno. I was thus able to
reduce in a Dantesque way certain deeds, certain speeches, certain days from the whole
immense catalogue of Sade. There is a kind of 'Anti-Inferno' (the Antechamber of Hell)
followed by three infernal 'Circles': 'The Circle of Madness'; 'The Circle of Shit', and
'The Circle of Blood'. Consequently, the Story-Tellers who, in Sade's novel, are four, are
three in my film, the fourth having become a virtuoso - she accompanies the tales of the
three others on the piano.
This means that the entire film with its unheard-of atrocities which are almost
unmentionable, is presented as an immense sadistic metaphor of what was the Nazi-
Fascist 'dissociation' from its 'crimes against humanity'. Curval, Blangis, Durcet, the
Bishop - Sade's characters (who are clearly SS men in civilian dress) behave exactly
with their victims as the Nazi-Fascists did with theirs. They considered them as objects
and destroyed automatically all possibility of human relationship with them.
This does not mean that I make all that explicit in the film. No, I repeat again, I have not
added a single word to what the characters in Sade have to say nor have I added a single
detail to the acts they commit. The only points of reference to the 20th century are the
way they dress, comport themselves, and the houses in which they live.
Naturally there is some disproportion between the four protagonists of Sade turned into
Nazi-Fascists and actual Nazi-Fascists who are historically true. There are differences in
psychology and ideology. Differences and also some incoherence. But this accentuates
the visionary mood, the unreal nightmare quality of the film. This film is a mad dream,
which does not explain what happened in the world during the 40s. A dream which is all
the more logical in its whole when it's the least in its details.
Practical reason says that during the Republic of Sal it would have been particularly
easy given the atmosphere to organise, as Sade's protagonists did, a huge orgy in a villa
guarded by SS men. Sade says explicitly in a phrase, less famous than so many others,
that nothing is more profoundly anarchic than power - any power. To my knowledge
there has never been in Europe any power as anarchic as that of the Republic of Sal: it
was the most petty excess functioning as government. What applies to all power was
especially clear in this one.
In addition to being anarchic what best characterises power - any power - is its natural
capacity to turn human bodies into objects. Nazi-Fascist repression excelled in this.
Another link with Sade's work is the acceptance/non-acceptance of the philosophy and
culture of the period. Just as Sade's protagonists accepted the method - at least mental or
linguistic - of the philosophy of the Enlightened Age without accepting all the reality
which produced it, so do those of the Fascist Republic accept Fascist ideology beyond
all reality. Their language is in fact their comportment (exactly like the Sade
protagonists) and the language of their comportment obeys rules which are much more
complex and profound than those of an ideology. The vocabulary of torture has only a
formal relation with the ideological reasons which drive men to torture. Nonetheless
with the characters in my film, although what counts is their sub-verbal language, their
words also have a great importance. Besides their verbiage is rather wordy. But such
wordy verbiage is important in two senses: firstly it is part of the presentation, being a
'text' of Sade's, that is being what the characters think of themselves and what they do;
and, secondly, it is part of the ideology of the film, given that the characters who quote
anachronistically Klossowsky and Blanchot are also called upon to give the message I
have established and organised for this film: anarchy of power, inexistence of history,
circularity (non-psychological not even in the psychoanalytic sense) between
executioners and victims, an institution anterior to a reality which can only be economic
(the rest, that is, the superstructure, being a dream or a nightmare).
We should not confuse ideology with message, nor message with meaning. The message
belongs in part - that of logic - to ideology, and in the other part - that of irreason - to
meaning. The logical message is almost always evil, lying, hypocritical even when very
sincere. Who could doubt my sincerity when I say that the message of Sal is the
denunciation of the anarchy of power and the inexistence of history? Nonetheless put
this way such a message is evil, lying, hypocritical, that is logical in the sense of that
same logic which finds that power is not at all anarchic and which believes that history
does exist. The part of the message which belongs to the meaning of the film is
immensely more real because it also includes all that the author does not know, that is,
the boundlessness of his own social, historical restrictions. But such a message can't be
delivered. It can only be left to silence and to the text. What finally now is the meaning
of a work? It is its form. The message therefore is formalistic; and precisely for that
reason, loaded infinitely with all possible content provided it is coherent - in the
structural sense.
In every shot it can be said I set myself the problem of driving the spectator to feeling
intolerant and immediately afterwards relieving him of that feeling.
Sal: an assessment
When Sal was originally submitted to the BBFC, it seemed as if the UK distributors
might be prosecuted. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith prepared this expert witness defence of
the film:
Early in 1978, when it looked not only as if Sal would be banned in Britain but that the
company distributing it would actually be prosecuted, I was asked to put on paper some
thughts about the film which might be useful to the defence if the case ever came to
trial. It was not a film I liked - I still don't - but it did not seem to me pornographic. Nor
did it seem to me likely to 'deprave and corrupt', to use the curious phrase of the
Obscene Publications Act. If anything it was liable to make people want to throw up. It
was, possibly, obscene, but only in a rather special sense. It was cruel and perverse but
the cruelty and perversion were a challenge, not an indulgence. Times have changed
since I wrote down my reasons why I did not think it should be banned. It may be that
people are less easily shocked and can take Sal in their stride. I hope this is not the
case. Pasolini made this film in order to disturb people, in order to make them face up to
something he felt they were unwilling to confront but was nevertheless real and
unescapable, the relationship between sex, death and power. In this respect times have
not changed. Ours is a highly sex-conscious culture which nevertheless displays a panic
fear of the darker and more dangerous side of sexuality. Indeed the more liberal the
culture becomes the greater the panic in the face of what is feared to lie on the other
side. Sal faces up to that other side and that is the reason why it deserves to be seen.
Pasolini's Sal
Pasolini's Sal is a disturbing but not necessarily particularly shocking film, and in
many ways decidedly anti-erotic. In terms of its author it shows a certain continuity
with the rest of his work in that themes are brought out into the open here which were
latent in some of his other films, but it also marks a sharp, if provisional, turn towards
the death forces against those of life and love celebrated elsewhere in his work.
Pasolini's immediately preceding film, The Arabian Nights, was the last of a trilogy of
films, based on medieval literary sources, which celebrated life, vitality and instinctual
sexuality. Sal approaches sexuality entirely from its darker side and appears to
represent a calculated break with its immediate predecessor (though not with the
author's work as a whole); and it was to have been followed, according to report, by
films which would escape from the nightmare atmosphere fashioned in it. Unfortunately
the author did not live to make any more films. If he had it might be easier to see the
present film in its full context, as a stage in a trajectory exploring the instinctual forces
regarded by the author as governing human life and variously expressed, perverted and
repressed in different historical and social circumstances.
I can understand Sal being found shocking by people with no knowledge of Pasolini's
earlier work, or again by people with no experience of 'X' films or whose experience of
erotic films is of a jolly (if occasionally perverted) romp. Sal, however, is absolutely
not an erotic film in the 'blue movie' tradition. Its theme is not erotic pleasure as such
but the perversion and subordination of love relationships to those of power. What
makes the film disturbing, as I shall argue later, is the way it plays on the audience's
uncertainties as to the boundaries separating normality and perversion, pleasure and
distaste. However, unlike earlier films, such as for example Theorem (1968) with its
affirmation of the positive, subversive value of homosexuality, Sal makes no claims on
behalf of what it shows. The subversion of accepted sexual patterns is presented as
almost entirely negative - with the proviso that a challenge is thrown out to members of
the audience as to where exactly they, consciously or unconsciously, would draw the
line between what attracts and what, inevitably, repels.
The film is set in the last days of Fascist rule in Italy, in a period when fascism had
ceased to be either popularly supported or politically viable, and when Mussolini's
puppet republic was sustained only by German arms and the fanaticism of the Fascist
'hierarchs'. It is significant - and the point would not be lost on an Italian audience - that
the only place-names mentioned in the film are Sal itself (headquarters of the puppet
republic) and Marzabotto (site of a notorious wartime massacre by the Nazi occupying
forces).
The film thus situates its subject matter firmly in relation to Fascist political power - not
so as to claim an historical connection between fascism and sexual orgies but rather to
propose an analogy between two forms of 'anarchy of power', political and sexual. Just
as fascism and Nazism can be seen as a form of the use of force and violence
unconstrained by Law and thus as an anarchy of the powerful against their victims, so
the world of the Marquis de Sade is seen as an anarchy of violence in sexual relations.
But just as fascism is not really anarchy, because freedom to infringe the law is reserved
to a small class at the expense of the rest, so the Sadian orgy is not an expression of
freedom either but takes the form of a brutal tyranny. Whereas in his previous films
Pasolini had attacked sexual conformity, here he considers - and rejects - the breakdown
of sexual norms in a context where the breakdown of normal constraints is not part of a
social and sexual revolution but simply the imposition, by a corrupt minority, on
unwilling victims, of its own impotence and perversion.
As the credits of the film make clear, Sal is an adaptation of Sade's notorious book The
120 Days of Sodom. It is important, however, to signal a major difference between the
two works. Sade's novel is about pleasure, albeit inextricably connected with power and
with death; Pasolini's film is almost exclusively about power, death and degradation,
and hardly about pleasure at all. In Sade's writing cruelty and the death wish appear as a
component of sexual pleasure, and when the pleasures of life are exhausted the supreme
pleasure - the supreme orgasm - comes in receiving and administering death. In Sal
everything turns on relations of power and the exercise of this power is shown in a pure
state. The fact that the instruments of power are the body or its organs seems at times
almost irrelevant. The holders of power in the film are shown as incapable of a direct
experience of sexual pleasure and as sexually impotent (at least in the sense of being
unable to make love). Male sexuality is represented in terms of the power of the penis,
seen either as a weapon of assault or as an emblem of abstract phallic potency. Female
sexuality and capacity for pleasure are totally denied and at any sign of their appearance
are instantly suppressed. The stories told by the procuresses to excite the company
contain no suggestion of there being any pleasure in it for the women themselves, while
the pleasure described for the men is solely that of displaying or exercising their own
force or of humiliating others. No woman is ever shown as choosing her own pleasure
(except for two girl victims, who sleep with each other and are threatened with
punishment, and a servant girl who sleeps with a guard and is shot on the spot). No men
except the executioners have a right to choose their pleasures and even for the
executioners bodily pleasure is masturbatory at best. More often 'pleasure' consists in
acting out fantasies whereby others are degraded, punished or tortured.
The Audience
It may be asked at this point what is the purpose of a work of art whose intention and
effect are to produce distaste at its own spectacle (which Sal undoubtedly does for a lot
of the time, not only because of the content but also because of the structure of
viewing). It can be responded that elements of distaste, displeasure, and even disgust,
have been part of the functioning of art at many points in history. Not only satirists and
moralists (Juvenal in the Roman empire, Swift in the 18th century) have played on these
elements, but there is a sense of unredeemed horror in much of classical tragedy and in
passages of Dante's Inferno (on which Sal is overtly modelled - especially in the
division of the action of the film into 'Circles'). In painting the infernal visions of
Hieronymous Bosch (15th century) are not merely grotesque but violently and
purposefully distasteful. Sal, however, is singularly unrelenting in its pursuit of a
hideousness redeemed only by an elegance of form. The only uplifting moments in the
film are deaths - the soldier and the black girl, the procuress who plays the piano - since
death is the only possible rebellion and the only possible release.
I would contend that the purpose of the film's makers was indeed to produce a vision of
hell, playing on a movement of alternating attraction and repulsion already intrinsic to
such visions but intensified in the film by virtue of its choice of subject matter. It may
seem surprising to invoke the Christian tradition here, in relation to a film such as Sal,
but it should be remembered that religion and the Church remained very important for
Pasolini even after he ceased to be a practising Catholic and his work is often sustained
by religious themes and a religious sensibility (most notably in The Gospel according to
Matthew, 1964). Within the Christian artistic tradition hell is represented not just a place
'out there', a site of unimaginable torments the vision of which is sufficient to terrify
people into keeping to the strait and narrow. It also represents something already present
within the soul. The power of Dante's Inferno lies in the fact that the sins for which the
characters are being punished are all sins which they are shown as having chosen and
desired to commit, so that readers of the book are put in a position where they can
identify with the sinner and with the ambition to commit the sin as well as with the
justice which punishes them. Deprived of its formal religious armature, a similar
conception can be found lurking not far below the surface of Sal - a conception of an
art which explores and exploits the will to sin in the process of bringing judgement to
bear on it. In lay terms what is at stake is the recognition (not always easy to make) of
the existence of perverse desire as latent everywhere, though expressed only in certain
individuals and under certain social conditions. What makes the film disturbing is not
that it provides an outlet for such desires but that it constantly frustrates desire.
Conclusion
Viewing of Sal was not intended by the makers to be a pleasant experience and in
practice most spectators do find it positively unpleasant - not because it is unequivocally
repulsive (though it sometimes is), but because the repulsion is balanced against
elements of attraction, whether normal or perverse. The fact that the film is disturbing in
a deliberately unpleasant way does not seem to me an argument for not allowing it to be
shown. Art - and film is no exception - has always contained elements that disturb rather
than console, that frustrate rather than satisfy. If the subject matter of Sal is to be
allowed to be spoken of at all, it must necessarily be disturbing. For it not to be so is
indeed to pander to pornography.
31 January 1978
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith is the editor of The Oxford History of World Cinema. His study
of L'avventura is published in the bfi Film Classics series.
I was twenty-seven when I first saw Pasolini's Sal. I worked nights at the popcorn
concession of the Westland Twins, a Laemmle theatre in Westwood specialising in
foreign films of the 'mature romance' variety. A friend managed The Pico, an art cinema
in the Fairfax District. It was autumn, 1977. I got off work at 10.30. I usually drove
home to Los Angeles, stopping at The Pico, where Sal ran that season as a midnight
movie. (Actually, I think it was an eleven o'clock midnight movie.) That's how I
happened to see this film, or parts of it, almost every night for two months.
I have a terribly spotty memory. This has served me pretty well as a writer, since I have
to fill the yawning gaps between what I truly remember with whatever my imagination
suggests 'must have happened'. I remember that melancholy period of my life in time-
stained flickers, a slide show of faces and landscapes across a paling light. I was twenty-
seven, but I think of myself then as 'pre-conscious'. The world was just beginning to
emerge as something separate from the muck of my private anxieties. I went to the
movies all the time. I believed that the emotions projected in films and dramatised in
popular songs were the same emotions I had. I felt tremendous nostalgia for a history I
didn't possess, for loves I'd never experienced, for bitter lessons I'd never learned.
One of the few places where you could get a drink after a certain hour was a Silver Lake
bar called The Headquarters, an S&M club where police impersonators in uniform
mingled with dowdier slaves and masters in dog collars and trouserless chaps. (Leather
had had its major effulgence much earlier in Los Angeles, celebrated in the classic
fistfucking porno, LA Plays Itself, and in movies by Wakefield Poole. By the late 70s the
hardcore raunch scene was more happening in New York and San Francisco.) There
were also the One Way, The Detour, The Spike, a constellation of more conventional
gay bars at the nether end of East Hollywood. The punk scene was in full mood swing.
One of the only boutiques on now-famous Melrose Boulevard was a tiny storefront
called Tokyo Rose, where you could buy pre-ripped T-shirts festooned with safety pins.
During the day, I worked at Legal Aid in Watts. A dispiriting job. I dealt with seriously
damaged, desperately poor people who lived in rotting bungalows where rats routinely
fell through crumbling ceilings into their breakfast cereal. I lived in a somewhat sinister
apartment hotel on Wilshire (The Bryson, where Stephen Frears shot The Grifters many
years later, simulating its mid-70s desuetude - when I lived there, Fred MacMurray was
the silent partner in the building's ownership) full of insomniacs, drifters, madmen, a
kind of Chelsea West: the night clerk was a preoperative transsexual named Stephanie.
It was a time of compulsive, almost mechanical sleeping around that felt good for a few
moments here and there. I had two jobs, and about two hours at the end of the night to
pick someone up in a bar. Whatever followed that took at least two more hours,
depending on the drive time, so I suppose in that faraway autumn of 1977 I got an
average of three hours sleep a night. That was my life, and Sal became for two months
a logical part of it, another little patch of soft, crumbly alienation and waking dream.
Sal is one of those rare works of art that really achieves shock value. Aesthetic shock
does have a salutary value, and it's always amusing to read the outpourings of some
cultural wastebasket decrying an artist who deploys shock 'for the sake of shock', as if to
qualify as a work of art, a work of art has to be something other than a work of art - a
tutorial in cherished homilies, an affirmation of quotidian values, and so on. I don't
think art has anything to do with morality and it shouldn't: I should be able to kill
everybody I don't like in a novel and get away with it, rape a twelve-year-old and piss
on my father's grave. It's not my job to tell anybody that these things are 'wrong'. It's my
job to show that these things happen, period.
Certain works yank the rug from under the meticulously planted furniture of middle-
class morality and the aesthetic torpor that decorates it. John Waters's Pink Flamingos,
Jean Rouch's Les Matres fous, Georges Franju's Le Sang des Bets, Andy Warhol's Blue
Movie, anything by Hershel Gordon Lewis, scattered moments in the films of Kenneth
Anger, Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas - well, you can make your own list of things that lifted
the top of your head off. I'm not sure that anyone is obliged to 'like' works of art that fall
into this category, or that 'liking' them is ever entirely the point, though critics, quite
often, mistake the celebration of the ghastly as an 'indictment of contemporary malaise',
etc. - in other words, they can only like something if it can be bent to reflect their own
moral certainties.
One way that Sal differs from the unabashedly perverse epiphanies of the cinema of
shock is in its pedantic moralism, which might have ruined it if the 'shock' part didn't so
thoroughly overwhelm the moralism. There is something absurdly winning about
Pasolini's explanation of the shit-eating in Sal as a commentary on processed foods,
and the fact that Pasolini was being sincere when he said it. And if you think about it,
his interpretation is essentially reasonable, though it's hardly the first thing a viewer
thinks when watching a roomful of people gobbling their own turds.
14
Sal eliminates a great deal of what makes The 120 Days the fantastic tale that it is.
Sade enumerates sexual acts that are physically impossible, gives his protagonists
organs that would properly belong to mules, and depicts tortures from which the victims
miraculously recover in order to be tortured again. Sal condenses this mayhem to
credible proportions, rendering Sade's decadent Salon as a sort of homicidal boarding
school.
The film's point of view is problematised from the outset. The only protagonists with
whom we might 'identify' are monstrosities, and the only 'look' that approximates that of
the viewer is the occasional, inexpressive gaze of a child-victim caught in unexpected
close-up. While the victims are utterly expendable, the outrages perpetrated on them are
pedagogical. They will 'learn' abjection from their captors, who initiate them into the
process of their own annihilation. However, it is also implied that ordinary fascism has
already trained them in passivity and infantile obedience to authority. We view the film
while imagining the victims' state of mind, at the same time we are denied access to it.
We see that the libertines will do nothing that corresponds to any normative code of
behaviour; that everything will end in massacre; that the narrative is a self-consuming
artifact that begins at zero and ends at zero. We anticipate its cruelties, in a sense look
forward to them, as to the satisfactory completion of a necessary rite. Sal engages
voyeurism rather than empathy, and attempts to turn voyeurism back on itself with
various distancing devices.
After the ritual of the forthcoming days is established, the film becomes a cycle of
routines, performed nightly in the same proscenium. Signora Vaccari, in her private
suite, consults her oval make-up mirror and adjusts her diaphanous off-the-shoulder
dress. This garment, a gauzy and obtrusive double triangle of piled chiffon decorated
with big flower-like appliqus of black acetate that stick out from it like poison quills,
acquires its own visual personality over several scenes in which Vaccari moves about
the Orgy Room in highly stylised, balletic swoops and swanning gestures. She tosses on
a cape-like black boa, studies herself in the oval mirror on the wardrobe door (which, as
it swings shut, reflects the other mirror), and then descends to the Orgy Room. The
bright, bluish light of the staircase, reflected on the glistening surface of a long table in
the centre of the hall arranged parallel to the left and right walls, echoes the design of
the film's opening shot; the long shot used each time a courtesan descends at story hour
renders the staircase as a kind of vaginal chute that delivers the grotesque. The Orgy
Room's architecture, its burnished colours, geometric Art Deco sconces, globe
chandeliers, 'conversation areas', symmetrical doors leading off to unknown parts of the
villa, becomes an imprint, eventually so familiar that the shifting groups of bodies
contained in it are shuffled like figments in a dream, their mutations scarcely perceived
by the viewer. The long shots that predominate in these scenes produce frustration, a
kind of 'anti-porno' fuzziness around the sexual acts - gropings, rubbings, etc. - that
transpire during the narrations. The standard perspectival framing of the hall has a
miniaturising effect on the people inside it.
On this first occasion the victims are clothed, in light-blue outfits resembling school
uniforms. Some sit at the feet of the libertines, others on chairs at either side of them,
flanked by the fuckers, whose enormous members are usually obvious from the way
their pants are photographed. The guards are also present, and the 'wives', at the
periphery of the action. Vaccari's stories recount her precocious corruption in childhood.
She commences with the story of a teacher who taught her to masturbate him. Although
Curval interrupts to fault Vaccari's first story for its lack of specific details, none of the
courtesans' subsequent tales is any more closely descriptive than the first: they all
suggest more or less arbitrary bits snipped out of the relevant sections in Sade, in
keeping with the metonymic inclination of the movie. The punctum, in each case, is the
sexual act at the heart of the story and its assumed effect on the audience within the film
as well as the audience beyond the frame.
I must mention again an important difference between Sade and Pasolini: the prodigious
excitements aroused by the (exhaustingly long-winded) stories in The 120 Days are
given an almost pleasureless cast in Sal. The libertines experience arousal almost
exclusively as a species of rage - and, curiously, at other times as an incitement to
peculiarly coquettish ways of acting out. There is, of course, nothing tender or romantic
in Sade; but there is, in everything, selfish pleasure. Pasolini's heroes appear to
experience their own depravity as an unassuagable irritant, no less than their victims'
experience of submission. This has to do with the stiff way that the actors have been
directed, the stifling lack of exuberance in their 'evil'. But it owes something too to
Pasolini's determination to implicate the viewer in this 'evil' while denying us the guilty
pleasure of viewing it head-on.
RW: Sal was made in 1975, the year, as you point out in the book, of Jaws. Clearly
cinema has moved on and in retrospect it's clear that Sal was a swansong of some kind.
Does it seem dated to you now?
GI: Sal doesn't seem dated to me, probably because there weren't imitations of it, and a
lot of what it shows is still upsetting to people. Also, the film is a period film, and
elaborately stylised, so it doesn't date the way a contemporary drama, slice-of-life sort
of film automatically dates as society evolves. As there isn't any realism in Sal its
reality hasn't become superannuated. It's hard to endorse the idea that cinema has moved
on. There isn't a single predominating tendency in cinema now. I would guess however
that some of the tics of 60s and 70s auteur cinema like Pasolini's might annoy a
contemporary audience: holding the camera a really long time on an extra's face,
messing up sight lines, that sort of thing. I probably overstated the importance of Jaws
in the book. I would guess that Star Wars had an even more baleful influence on things.
Incidentally, I just saw a film called Deep Blue Sea that makes Jaws, intellectually
speaking, look like The Age of Louis XIV.
RW: Pasolini's murder prevented him making films that might have qualified Sal, or
revealed more fully its relationship to his earlier work. Is this a problem?
GI: The problem is only there in the sense that Pasolini's murder and this particular film
were so readily linked, and eclipsed the rest of Pasolini's work, in a certain journalistic
kind of discussion. Sal is a satire of consumer society and perfectly consistent with
Pasolini's other films and his polemical writings. What he saw as an extreme spiritual
crisis in modern society demanded this particular form, and these extremely unnerving
images.
RW: The murder also had the effect of linking Sal to extreme gay sexual behaviour.
But is Sal a gay film? Is it specifically tied to the mid-70s, the time of Mapplethorpe,
Fassbinder, Foucault?
GI: Sal has a lot of homoerotic imagery and shows numerous homosexual acts - I'm
not sure what a 'gay' film is, what I think of as a 'gay' film would be something by
Almodovar, an intelligent person whose work doesn't interest me at all. Certainly you
can find things in common between Pasolini, Mapplethorpe, Fassbinder, and Foucault,
an exploration of subject matter considered 'extreme' by conventionally minded people,
but if we speak of the 70s (and I dislike this kind of decade-ism, though like everyone
I'm guilty of it), remember that everyone was testing the edges of acceptable content, in
films as disparate as Caligula and The Eyes of Laura Mars. Some of that exploration
reflected a deep questioning of normative sexual behavior and other values and some of
it was strictly about fashion.
RW: The relationship of Sal to Italian fascism has been questioned, and it does seem
like the link is made quite perfunctorily. To what extent do you see the film as relating
to the historical phenomenon of fascism?
GI: What's depicted in the film is a situation of total control over certain individuals by
other individuals. These controlling individuals represent the apparatus of the state:
clergy, banking, etc. In Sal the model of totalitarianism has been given a kind of
desublimated lubricity that's never found in totalitarian regimes, which are invariably
puritanical. Yet the appeal of fascism is an erotic one, and Pasolini wanted to show this
as an explicit thing, the power to control another person's body, to use it sexually while
destroying it, to get sexual pleasure from another person's suffering. Sal tries to explain
fascism as this physical expression of the will to power, and to lure the viewer into
complicity by showing a lot of stunningly gorgeous, naked teenagers. So we become
accomplices to this horror by virtue of our own desire to keep looking, to keep cruising
these adorable kids.
RW: Opposition to the censorship of Sal has often concentrated on the extent to which
the film makes us face up to fascism or to other, more contemporary abuses of power.
Do you agree with this? And, in any case, does Sal need to be justified in this way?
GI: I think the censorship really is based on puritanical phobias rather than any
conscious attempt to stifle a critique of fascism. Fascism is in the bloodstream of a
certain kind of moralist, but the main thing is this silly idea that people shouldn't look at
naked bodies, depictions of sex, etcetera, etecetera, because it's 'harmful', and behind
that is the question, harmful to what? I don't think Sal, or any other film, should have
to justify itself by having an agenda of social criticism. There is nothing wrong with
pornography. I don't happen to even agree that it's harmful to children. Most censorship
efforts today claim to be protecting children. If people cared about children, they would
look into child labor at Nike factories in China, or the places in Mexico where Disney
has its costumes fabricated by children earning thirty cents an hour.
RW: Your writing deals fairly unblinkingly with violence, including sexual violence,
and yet is also full of social conscience of a kind (radical, leftwing, antimainstream) that
Pasolini displayed too. Do you see any parallels?
GI: I couldn't possibly compare myself to Pasolini. I'm not anywhere near as prolific,
I'm not the kind of artist who is all over the map, continually producing things. I rather
envy the situation of artists and writers in Europe, where, if you're a novelist or a film-
maker and write a play, the play gets published in a nice edition by a small press, in
America you can forget about that. Very, very few American writers are treated as
serious artists in the European manner, and the ones who are have been around for fifty
years, queening it over the rest of us. Very few American writers ever get to see a
uniform edition of their work, or have all their work in print. Publishers simply do not
support writers on the basis of their literary worth, it's all about money, period. Even if
your editors believe in what you do very strongly, they have a bottom line that they're
more responsible to than they are to you.
I don't really think of my own work in terms of 'radical, leftwing, antimainstream', this
is how other people characterise it. (I am also routinely accused of having a grotesque
imagination, usually for describing things I find in the newspaper.) I think a certain way
quite naturally and my sympathies have always been with the unfortunate, I have that in
common with Pasolini. On the other hand, I would never resort to the kind of faux-
naivet you find in a lot of Pasolini's work, I could never carry that off and anyway I
don't like it. And I think I have a much better sense of humour than he did, I'm not at all
taken with Pasolini's 'bawdy' side: as I said in the book, it usually looks bogus. I admire
Pasolini's humanity and I certainly would feel lucky to achieve in my life one-tenth of
what he did, but I am, quite sincerely, allergic to the grandiosity of the artist-as-public-
conscience as well as the artist-as-pop-star, these are roles that require a certain degree
of self-delusion and a great deal of relentless self-promotion.
RW: You say in the book that writing it, and rewatching the film for it, made you
change your mind about Sal. How, finally, would you assess it?
GI: Actually, I said that watching all of Pasolini's movies again after some years, I
changed my opinion about some of them, but in fact Sal seemed very much the same
as when I first saw it: if there were such a thing as an ugly jewel, or an ugly butterfly,
that would be the way to describe it. It's one of the few films that really burns a hole in
the medium, that you can't really categorise or reduce to a schematic; it's just a very
weird and arresting picture, and somehow more like a great painting than a great movie,
like Uccello's Profanation of the Host or Gricault's Raft of the Medusa. I think its
analysis of consumer society has become an absolutely standard one, which is to say,
one that many thinking people accept as valid, but if this analysis were present to us all
the time, in the bald terms Pasolini presents it in, we would simply go mad and be
unable to do anything about anything. So it reflects a spiritual and intellectual impasse
that Pasolini might have found his way out of, had he lived; now that I think of it, it
does catch the spirit of that particular time, the suffocation of the mid-70s, the dead
utopian hopes, the pointless fucking around.
Gary Indiana has been described by the Guardian as "one of the most important
chroniclers of the American psyche". "One reads Mr. Indiana's ... work with
astonishment at his talent" (New York Times). Born in 1950 in New England he now
lives in New York and Los Angeles. After two collections of short stories, Scar Tissue
(1987) and White Trash Boulevard (1988), he published his first novel, Horse Crazy, in
1988, followed by Gone Tomorrow (1993), Rent Boy (1994) and a pair of books about
'true crimes', Resentment: A Comedy (1997), based on the trials of Lyle and Erik
Menendez, and Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story (1999). From 1985 to
1988 he was Art Critic for the Village Voice, and a collection of his critical writing, Let
It Bleed: Essays 1985-1995, was published in 1996. His play Roy Cohn/Jack Smith was
filmed by Jill Godmillow in 1994. He has acted in more than 20 films and played The
Voice of the Radio in Neil Bartlett's London production of Genet's Splendid's. He is
currently working on a new novel, Depraved Indifference, due out next year. He will
pay a rare visit to London to attend the BFI/ICA conference on Salo on 29 and 30
September.
This is an updated version of an article that first appeared on the bfi website in August
2000.
Sal had its first screening in Britain at the Old Compton Street cinema club in 1977. It
was shown in its full uncut version without a certificate from the BBFC. After a few
days, the cinema was raided by the police, who confiscated the print and threatened
action against the cinema owners under the offence of common law indecency. The
cinema appealed, explaining that the film was screened uncut only after taking advice
from the then Secretary of the BBFC, James Ferman.
Sal had originally been submitted to the BBFC by United Artists in January 1976,
when it was refused a certificate on the legal grounds of gross indecency. Gross
indecency was defined in British law as 'anything which an ordinary decent man or
woman would find to be shocking, disgusting and revolting', or, which 'offended against
recognised standards of propriety'. Unlike the Obscene Publications Act - which at that
stage did not apply to films - gross indecency allowed for no defence of artistic or
cultural merit to be mounted on the film's behalf. Furthermore, there was no
requirement to consider the film - or the film's purpose - as a whole. If any part of the
film was indecent then the whole film was illegal. The only way in which the Board
could remedy such a problem was through extensive cutting to remove any possible
elements of 'indecency'. United Artists assumed that cuts would make the film
acceptable, but James Ferman had argued that editing would 'destroy the film's purpose
by making the horrors less revolting, and therefore more acceptable'. Ferman did not
feel that the film should be cut, describing Sal as 'one of the most disturbing films ever
to be seen by the Board, yet its purpose is deeply serious... it is quite certainly shocking,
disgusting and revolting - even in the legal sense - but it is meant to be. It wants us to be
appalled at the atrocities of which human nature is capable when absolute power is
wielded corruptly'.
Clearly, this film was very different from Pasolini's 'trilogy of life' and sexual liberation
which had preceded it (The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian
Nights), and United Artists sold the rights on to Cinecenta, who were advised by
Ferman to show the film without a certificate, on a club basis, so that it could be seen
uncut as Pasolini had intended. The police prosecution was an embarrassment, and
Ferman intervened and spoke to the Deputy DPP.
By that time the campaign to bring films within the scope of the Obscene Publications
Act, which was led by Ferman, had borne fruit in the Criminal Law Act 1977, and the
indecency charges were dropped. The film could now be considered as a whole, as
could its cultural and artistic value. Nonetheless, it was made clear to Ferman that
charges might still be brought under the 'deprave and corrupt' test of the Obscene
Publications Act if the film were to be shown uncut. Ferman therefore agreed to take
advice from two distinguished QCs and to assist in the editing of a club version. In
1979, the DPP agreed that proceedings need not be taken against this reduced version.
The cut version prepared by James Ferman for club screenings lost nearly six minutes of
footage, removing - amongst other things - the coprophagia, the extreme violence at the
end of the film, and certain elements of homosexual behaviour that were believed to be
vulnerable to prosecution. It also added an on-screen prologue to legally 'explain' the
context of Mussolini's regime at Sal and the writings of the Marquis de Sade. This
version was shown at club cinemas throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s and
became a regular feature at the Scala Club Cinema in King's Cross, where it often
screened on double bills with Pasolini's Porcile (classified 'X' uncut by the BBFC). The
club version was, however, never formally submitted to the BBFC for classification,
presumably because there was by that stage no commercial benefit in considering a
wider theatrical release.
By the early 1990s the only surviving print of this edited version was almost
unwatchable and badly damaged, as the apologies in the Scala's programme notes from
1990 onwards attest. Possibly the last screening of the cut version was at the Electric
Cinema in 1993. The uncut version of the film resurfaced at the NFT in 1996 as part of
the bfi's Pasolini retrospective, coinciding with the publication of The Passion of Pier
Paolo Pasolini by Sam Rohdie. The print provided to the NFT in 1996 was the full
version, on loan from the Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini, and this may have been the first
time this version had been seen in the UK since the NFT's Pasolini season in 1982. The
1996 NFT screening was certainly the last public screening of Sal in the UK until late
in 2000 when the film was revived in a new print by the bfi.
In September 2000, the bfi unveiled its new, uncut print of Sal at a two day conference
at the ICA in London. The conference coincided with the publication of a bfi Modern
Classic on the film by Gary Indiana and preceded a proposed resubmission of the film
to the BBFC. The conference included two screenings of the film, a series of talks about
Sal and a general panel discussion. Participants in the conference included James
Ferman, former Director of the BBFC, Sam Rodhie, David Forgacs, and Gary Indiana.
Sal was formally resubmitted to the BBFC by the bfi in October 2000. This submission
came shortly after the BBFC had published a new set of classification guidelines, in
September 2000, themselves the result of a major process of public consultation. The
Board had stated in its News Release when launching these guidelines that the BBFC
would no longer intervene with material for adult viewing unless the material in
question was either illegal or genuinely likely to be harmful.
The Board was satisfied that Sal was neither illegal nor harmful within the terms of its
new guidelines and therefore agreed to classify the film '18' uncut for cinema exhibition
on 16 November 2000. The film had been viewed by a number of examiners at the
Board, as well as by the Board's Director, Robin Duval, and its President, Andreas
Whittam Smith. The film was subsequently submitted for video classification by the bfi
and was awarded an '18' uncut certificate for video and DVD release soon after on 19
December 2000.
In reaching the decision to pass Sal '18' uncut, the BBFC considered that although the
film was undeniably - and intentionally - shocking, it did not contain anything that
would 'deprave and corrupt' viewers - the basic test of the Obscene Publications Act. In
fact, Sal's purpose and its likely effect on viewers seemed to be quite the opposite. In
the Board's view, the film depicted its events in a cold, detached and ritualised style,
deliberately removing any hint of titillation. The film also mirrored de Sade's verbose
literary style, alienating the viewer through its repetitions. Although the film contained
many disturbing scenes, the Board agreed that its intention was to deliberately shock
and appal audiences at the evil of fascism and to vividly illustrate the idea that 'absolute
power corrupts absolutely'. Much like James Ferman in the 1970s, the BBFC agreed
that any attempt to cut the film would undermine the director's purpose by making the
film less shocking, the events depicted more palatable, and therefore less effective.
Although the film was suggestive of many horrors, the Board noted that most of its on
screen violence was in fact relatively muted and shown in long shot or extreme long
shot. There were no lingering close ups and the film's climactic death scenes could even
be said to appear technically unconvincing by modern standards.
The Board was conscious that although the film had been considered potentially
'indecent' at law in 1976, the protection now granted by the Obscene Publications Act
(extended to cover film in 1977) made Sal less problematic in 2000. The Obscene
Publications Act requires that any film should be considered as a whole and that its
more difficult scenes should not be considered in isolation. Given Sal's serious
purpose, and its avoidance of titilatory or pornographic content, the Board concluded
that the film could not be considered obscene within the meaning of the Act, nor
regarded as harmful to viewers.
The Board also considered that, ultimately, Sal, is a film of limited appeal and is
unlikely to ever receive widespread distribution. Those people who chose to view the
film would, because of its notoriety, be aware of its contents. Nonetheless, the Board did
recognise the public's desire for more detailed consumer advice, also highlighted by the
recent public consultation exercise, and the consumer advice issued for Sal drew clear
attention to the content of the film: "Contains strong violence, sexual violence and
scenes of torture and degradation".
After the BBFC had classified the film, Sal was screened at the ICA, NFT and a
number of regional film theatres. The print remains available for hire from the bfi,
although the easy availability of the video and DVD version - released in 2001 - has
probably done more to make Sal accessible to a wider audience. Ironically, before the
BBFC agreed to classify the film for video and DVD release, copies of the deleted
Region 1 DVD of the film were changing hands for up to 300.00 on ebay. From 2001,
by contrast, the film would be available on video and DVD in the UK from any outlet
for a far more modest outlay. Almost inevitably, Sal appeared late in 2001 on the Film
Four channel, introduced by Mark Kermode. The screening was accompanied by a half
hour documentary on the film, 'Sal - Fade to Black', featuring behind-the-scenes
footage of Pasolini working on set.
Sal has for many years been available in France where it continues to play occasionally
at Parisian art cinemas (French certificate '16' uncut). Until recently, it was also widely
available on video in France (notably from the Virgin Megastore on the Champs
Elysees). On its original 1970s release in France, however, Sal was rated 'X' and
confined - along with Ai No Corrida - to limited screenings in Paris porn cinemas
(similar to the recent situation with Baise-Moi).
Sal has also been available uncut on video in Italy (where legal action was originally
taken against it in the mid 1970s), uncut on video in Germany, and in a strangely
trimmed version in Holland (with, amongst other things, some of the whipping
reduced). In Denmark and Austria where there is no adult film censorship, Sal is a de
facto '16' uncut. In a notable example of Nordic liberalism, Sal was passed '15' uncut in
Sweden as early as 1976, a decision that the Swedish Censors commented caused 'some
surprise' with the public. This was particularly so given the Swedes traditionally hard
line attitude on violence (which contrasts with their famously liberal attitude to sex).
Across the border, Sal fared less well in Finland, where it was originally refused a
release in 1976. Nonetheless, in 1984 the Finish Film Archive were granted permission
for the film to be shown to persons over 18 at two special screenings at the Film
Archive cinema. A subsequent submission by Universal Artists for general release in
1985 was unsurprisingly unsuccessful and the film remained banned in Finland until
2001 when adult film censorship was finally abolished.
In the former Eastern Bloc countries, the fall of communism has led to an almost
complete end to censorship. In one amusing example during 1999, Sal played in a
Czech drive in theatre, billed on posters around Prague as 'Pasolini's controversial
historical drama'. Sal had become a date movie for the first - and probably only - time
in its history.
Sal has also been released on video in the US in an uncut, unrated version, also briefly
being made available by Criterion on DVD in 1999. The DVD was withdrawn shortly
after release although stories vary as to whether this was due to a botch over rights or
the film's content. Given the film's long availability on video in the States it seems that
the former is more likely. Interestingly, Sal's censorship record in the US is not as
unblemished as this might suggest, largely as a result of the arbitrary enforcement of
'local community standards'. A copy of the video was seized from the Pink Pyramid gay
bookshop in Cincinnati in 1994, although the case was subsequently thrown out on a
technicality. The US 'Video Retriever' guide to this day recommends 'discretion' when
ordering this title.
The most recent banning of Sal appears to be in Australia. Sal was first banned in
Australia in 1976 and was refused classification a number of times after that. In 1993
the ban was finally overturned but this led to a number of awkward questions being
asked in Parliament about the Office of Film and Literature Classification's decision.
After an amendment to Australian law in 1996, Sal was reviewed again and its
classification withdrawn in 1998.
Finally, it is interesting to note that in the UK, Sal has historically often been screened
under the title Pasolini's 120 Days of Sodom. The BBFC's record for the 1976 film
reject and the 1991 satellite TV reject both list the film as 120 Days of Sodom (see the
BBFC website for details). Like the earlier 'Trilogy of Life', until 2000 Sal had only
been made available in the UK in a dubbed English language version and never under
the on-screen title Sal. The 1996 NFT screenings of the uncut version were, however,
Italian language with subtitles and correctly titled Sal, as were the 2000 cinema and
2001 video and DVD releases.
Craig Lapper is Chief Assistant (Policy) at the British Board of Film Classification. He
has also written pieces on the censorship history of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (for
the Universal DVD release) and Straw Dogs (for the Freemantle DVD release).
Prologue
Sal, a small town on Lake Garda, was the last place in Italy where Mussolini held
power. He had been deposed in the summer of 1943 and then rescued by the Nazis from
his prison north of Rome to escape the advancing Allied armies. With the help of
German and Fascist troops, he set up a new puppet Republic - the Fascist Republic of
Sal - and during the eighteen months that it lasted, over 72,000 people were killed, a
further 40,000 were mutilated, and yet another 40,000 deported to the German
concentration camps.
In the whole of Italian history, no period can equal the wave of concentrated sadism
perpetrated in northern Italy during the last year and a half of World War II. Some of
these deeds were the work of eighteen year-old boys, rounded up as conscripts to serve
with the Fascists. In one horrifying massacre at Marzabotto, these boys were forced to
help in the butchering of 2,000 inhabitants, including 53 other youths hanged for failing
to report for this compulsory service. On other occasions, civilians were tortured,
women and children sexually defiled and killed.
The names 'Sal' and 'Marzabotto' are instantly recognisable to all Italians. They
symbolise the horror of this, their last civil war, the last time a truly evil government
ruled in any part of Italy. For - what was to be his final film, Pier Paolo Pasolini chose
the actual scenes of these atrocities - the region where he himself had grown up - as the
setting for a denunciation of the corrupt use of power.
For his plot, he chose de Sade's novel The 120 Days of Sodom, in which four libertines
order the rounding up of innocent young victims for an orgy of debauchery. In Pasolini's
film, sexual brutality becomes a metaphor for political brutality, as four wartime
Fascists act out these eighteenth-century fantasies with the help of four procuresses. In
the ceremonies they perform, no speech has been added to what de Sade's characters
say, and no detail to the acts they commit. Pasolini has simply transferred the action
from eighteenth-century France to the 1944 Republic of Sal.
He uses, too, some of the imagery of Dante's Inferno, with its terrible Circles of Hell,
where those who had done violence to man and God included the blasphemers and the
sodomites. For Pasolini, there was, too, the violence of dehumanised sex, of the
exploitation and degradation of the human body, which he felt to be at the heart of
Fascism. In one circle of Dante's Hell, as in Pasolini's film, the sufferers are immersed
in excrement to await their fate. In Italy, such imagery is traditionally associated with
the degradation of the body and the spirit.
Pasolini's horror at this unbridled use of power is one the distributors of this film believe
we all share. They regret that the version you are about to see has had some of its most
extreme moments eliminated. The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions has
stated that if the full version were shown again in the United Kingdom, the exhibitor
might risk prosecution. It is to avoid this that the film has been re-edited, but we hope
that Pasolini's final testament survives.
Epilogue
It would be naive to think that what happened in Sal will never happen again. Murder
and torture are still practised in secret in many parts of the world - and the families of
the victims, as well as many of the collaborators, will have to live with the memory of
these atrocities.
GNERO
O que torna revolucionrias essas novas posies e continua a provocar escndalo que
ele argumentou sua concepo da sexualidade em sua relao com o inconsciente,
vinculando desse modo, pela primeira vez, a concepo do inconsciente, os sintomas e a
sexualidade. Freud mostra a sexualidade consciente embasada e ordenada por uma vida
libidinal insconsciente, e o sujeito consciente, senhor de si, conduzido por uma
determinao inconsciente radical co-extensiva ao sexual. A ruptura de concepo que a
psicanlise opera deve-se a essa articulao fundamental entre uma subjetividade
dividida (Spaltung: diviso do sujeito com ele mesmo) e o campo sexual. a, ontem
como hoje, que aquilo que ela ressalta foi e continua sendo inaceitvel.
principalmente sobre esse ponto essencial que a psicanlise se separa radicalmente da
sexologia ou da psiquiatria. [pg. 20-1] A psicopatologia da vida sexual Catherine
Desprats-Pequignot
A teoria das pulses , por assim dizer, nossa mitologia, dizia Freud em 1932. Essa
teoria, central na elaborao metapsicolgica freudiana, ope, em primeiro lugar, na
primeira tpica, pulses sexuais e pulses de autoconservao e depois menciona, no
segundo tpico, a articulao conflitual entre pulses de vida(pulses sexuais e pulses
de autoconservao) e pulses de destruio e de morte(por estas Freud esclarece
principalmente os problemas colocados pelo sadismo e pelo masoquismo). [pg. 30-1] A
psicopatologia da vida sexual Catherine Desprats-Pequignot
Com a teoria das pulses sexuais, Freud abre o caminho concepo segundo a qual a
sexualidade dos humanos no est numa relao objetivvel e natural com uma
finalidade biolgica de reproduo da espcie, mas numa relao subjetiva, social e
lingstica com uma finalidade inconsciente de satisfao das pulses. O campo do
pulsional sexual revela-se desse modo co-extensivo no ser humano constituio e
determinao da vida psquica, vida psquica da qual Freud destaca a diviso (Spaltung)
irredutvel com a conceitualizao do inconsciente. [pg. 32] A psicopatologia da vida
sexual Catherine Desprats-Pequignot
Representao de desejo e escolha de objetos A criao de desejo do objeto seio
tenta preencher a perda constitutiva do desejar. Nesse sentido, possvel dizer que o
objeto seio o primeiro da srie dos objetos substitutivos fantasiados ou reais,
parciais ou totais(o corpo, uma pessoa) que viro ao longo de toda a vida colonizar o
lugar vazio dessa perda, apresentar-se no lugar do objeto primordial perdido, o nico
que poderia proporcionar satisfao pulsional completa, que traria justamente, assim, a
extino do desejo. Se o objeto da pulso aquilo em que ou por meio do que a pulso
pode alcanar seu objetivo(Freud, 1915), portanto em funo do desejo que esse
objeto investido com um objetivo de satisfao. Em si mesmo o objeto da pulso
portanto indiferente. Freud sublinha: No necessariamente um objeto estranho, mas
igualmente uma parte do prprio corpo. Pode ser substitudo vontade ao longo de
todos os destinos conhecidos pela pulso. [pg. 43] A psicopatologia da vida sexual
Catherine Desprats-Pequignot
A diferena entre a neurose e a sade s concerne vida desperta num e outro caso e
desaparece nos sonhos noturnos[...] o homem saudvel possui tambm em sua vida
psquica aquilo que torna possvel a formao de sonhos e dos sintomas[...]tambm se
entrega a recalcamentos [...]. O homem saudvel portanto um neurtico em potencial
[...] sua vida pretensamente saudvel penetrada de uma multido de sintomas,
insignificantes, verdade, e de pouca importncia prtica. [Freud, 1916-7, p. 489]
Os desejos formadores de sonhos so em geral de natureza perversa, incestuosa ou
revelam uma hostilidade insuspeita com relao s pessoas prximas ou amadas. E
prossegue:
Ora, como todos os homens tm esses sonhos perversos, incestuosos, cruis, como
todos esses sonhos no constituem conseqentemente o monoplio dos neurticos,
estamos autorizados a concluir que se deve ver nisso o modo de desenvolvimento
normal e que os neurticos s apresentam ampliado e aumentado, o que a anlise dos
sonhos nos revela igualmente no homem como boa sade. [363-4][pg. 69]
Cada ser humano vem assumir um lugar que, desde antes de seu nascimento, lhe
designado pelo desejo dos pais e o situa no mundo como menino ou menina. No raro
o desejo dos pais(explcito e/ou inconsciente) e o sexo anatmico e civil no
coincidirem. A histria psicossexual do sujeito carregar sua marca mais ou menos
importante, mas a maioria dos humanos nem por isso recolocam em questo, pelo
menos conscientemente, a correspondncia entre seu sexo e sua identidade sexual. Em
compensao, alguns sujeitos recusam de modo explcito o sexo e a identidade civil que
lhes coube em virtude da inadequao destes convico que tm de serem homens ou
mulheres. Os chamados transexuais colocam dessa maneira em toda a sua radicalidade a
questo da posio subjetiva da identidade sexual. [pg. 74] A psicopatologia da vida
sexual Catherine Desprats-Pequignot
A convico, a certeza do transexual de ser, como diz Stoller, uma mulher num corpo
de homem (ou inversamente), no deixa de fazer ressoar a questo neurtica histrica:
O que ser uma mulher? Ou esta: quem sou, um homem ou uma mulher? Porm o
neurtico que se identifica inconscientemente em seus sonhos ou em seus
comportamentos com uma figura do outro sexo, como Dora(Freud, 1905), que se
identificava com seu pai e com M. K...., no apresenta por isso a convico do
transexual e no questiona seu sexo ou sua identidade sexuada. Em compensao,
coloca a questo do que mantm juntos o sexo e o significante: O que o sexo dito
feminino? Essa uma das questes colocadas por Dora. Assim, na situao em que o
neurtico se coloca e coloca a questo da identificao simblica, o transexual, pode-se
dizer, a escamoteia: ele confunde o rgo real com o significante. [J. Lacan][pg. 78]
A psicopatologia da vida sexual Catherine Desprats-Pequignot
Pode-se entender dessa maneira as questes sobre o gozo do outro que muitos
amantes se colocam aps o ato sexual, tendo esgotado todos os recursos de sua
disposio perversa: ser que correu tudo bem, ser que o outro gozou de fato?
Ser que se soube ser um bom parceiro? A est uma das diferenas entre a posio
neurtica e a posio perversa. O pervertido no se coloca a questo sobre o gozo
do parceiro reduzido posio de instrumento colocado a servio do saber sobre o
gozo do outro, do qual se prevalece. [pg. 88] A psicopatologia da vida sexual
Catherine Desprats-Pequignot
O terceiro a obra do Marqus de Sade, em que a sexualidade aparece pela primeira vez
sob a forma de uma fico de carter fortemente poltico como um instituto prprio
da condio humana, independente da religio e da moralidade, e suficientemente
crucial para determinar por si mesmo a carreira dos sujeitos sociais(de forma ativa ou
passiva). E o quarto, finalmente, a da constituio ao longo do sculo XVIII das
primeiras formulaes sistemticas de uma economia poltica, ou seja, de uma teoria da
reproduo coletiva da espcie humana. A fisiocracia, considerada comumente como a
primeira de tais frmulas, enfatizava particularmente a preeminncia da produo
natural a partir da terra a agricultura. [...] No caso de Sade e da fisiocracia, a ruptura
atinge a qualidade fsico-moral da condio humana, seja pela nfase nas condies
naturais da reproduo coletiva(e seu propociamento poltico), seja pela nfase na
condio hedonista, no reprodutivo(antes mesmo destrutiva), do desejo (e sua
revolucionria apologia): Franais, encore um effort.... [A SEXUALIDADE NAS
CIENCIAS SOCIAS: LEITURA CRTICA DAS CONVENES.Luis Fernando Dias
Duarte. pg. 44-5]
A nfase da sexualidade como uma montagem tem como correlato o destaque conferido
ao conceito de pulso( e de pulso sexual) como sendo o que talvez melhor expresse a
originalidade do pensamento de Freud nesse terreno. O conceito de Triebe (pulso)
forjado exatamente para dar conta do carter no instintivo da sexualidade humana, de
sua plasticidade, de suas mltiplas, contingentes e mutantes feies. [PSICANLISE E
SEXUALIDADE: CRTICA E NORMALIZAO. Ins Loureiro pg. 86]
Mas como explicar ento a trajetria das representaes audiovisuais que, em muitos
casos, antecipa-se a definies jurdicas co-legais? Na contramo destas tendncias, e
em sintonia com pesquisadoras que de alguma maneira vm chamando a ateno para a
especificidade dos significados que circulam em meios de comunicao de massa como
o cinema e a TV, este trabalho pretende sugerir que, de maneiras em geral imprevistas e
no planejadas, ao captar, expressar de maneiras diferentes e difundir representaes, os
meios de comunicao participam ativamente de processos de mudana e da construo
social de significados. [SOCIOLOGIA, PESQUISA DE MERCADO E
SEXUALIDADE NA MIDIA: AUDIENCIAS X IMAGENS. Esther Imprio
Hamburger, Heloisa Buarque de Almeida. pg. 131]
As fantasias do reverendo ingls so uma boa metfora para comear a pensar nas
fantasias corporais entretidas em nossas e em outras sociedades. De fato, em todas as
sociedades humanas, o corpo desfigurado e re-configurado para adequar-se a fantasias
socialmente compartilhadas, isto , s convenes sociais vigentes.O que recentemente
passamos a chamar de mutilaes genitais so s uma pequena parte dessas re-
configuraes que afetam o corpo e a alma daqueles que as experimentam.
[FANTASIAS CORPORAIS. Mariza Correa. pg. 175]
Com Sade ns descemos a uma espcie de abismo do horror, abismo do horror que
devemos conhecer, que , alm disso, um dever particular da filosofia pelo menos
da filosofia que eu represento colocar em questo, esclarecer e tornar conhecido,
mas no, eu diria, de uma maneira geral. Eu sou bibliotecrio; claro que no
colocaria os livros de Sade disposio de meus leitores sem determinadas
formalidades. Mas uma vez cumpridas tais formalidades a autorizao do
encarregado e as demais precaues acredito que, para qualquer um que queira
ir ao fundo do que significa o homem, a leitura de Sade no apenas
recomendvel, mas tambm indispensvel(Pauvert,1957: 56)[ OS PERIGOS DA
LITERATURA: EROTISMO, CENSURA E TRANSGRESSO. Eliane Robert
Moraes.pg. 226]
Sade disse e repetiu ao longo de toda a sua obra que desejava conhecer o ser
humano na sua totalidade, avanando sem medo sobre territrios perigosos, nos
quais seus contemporneos iluministas no ousavam pisar. Para ele, tratava-se de
revelar a verdade por completo, o que implicava abrir mo de todo e qualquer
preconceito para ampliar as possibilidades de entendimento do homem, levando
em conta suas fantasias mais secretas, cruis e inconfessveis. A filosofia deve
dizer tudo, reitera a personagem principal de Histoire de Juliette(Sade, 1998: 582)
Quais seriam , vale perguntar, os perigos subjacentes a esse tudo dizer? Que tipo
de subverso esse tipo de literatura que interroga o homem a partir de
transgresses fundamentais, como o incesto, a tortura e o assassinato- prope para
quem a l? Ou, colocando a pergunta de outra forma: que ordem de ameaas aos
indivduos e sociedade pode se ocultar em uma obra que manipula
representaes do mal, tal como a fico de Sade, ou mesmo a de Bataille? [OS
PERIGOS DA LITERATURA: EROTISMO, CENSURA E TRANSGRESSO.
Eliane Robert Moraes.pg. 227]
As idias de Bataille parecem apontar para uma terceira margem desse debate.
Para o autor de Lerotisme, os livros que expressam o mal no se justificam por
uma simples ausncia moral, mas sim por expressarem uma hipermoral. Trata-
se de uma literatura que busca descobrir na criao artstica aquilo que a
realidade recusa, operando uma espcie de ruptura com o mundo e
conseqentemente com as exigncias sociais de ordem tica e moral. Sua visada
ltima seria a de despertar, de colocar em jogo propriamente dito, virtualidades
ainda insuspeitas(Bataille, 1979: 171 e 180).
Ao realizar uma tal explorao fora das dimenses ticas ou morais, os autores
desses livros que tm em Sade um de seus representantes mais ilustres abrem
mo de todo e qualquer escrpulo da tradio humanista para discorrer sobre
tudo aquilo que nega os princpios desse mesmo humanismo. Para tanto, eles se
impem a tarefa de ouvir a voz dos algozes, considerando seus motivos, e at
mesmo a sua falta de motivos, de forma a construir o que Bataille chama de
cumplicidade no conhecimento do mal.
Da mesma forma, essa adeso hipermoral estaria na base do desafio que a fico
sadiana no cessa de propor ao leitor, na tentativa de estabelecer com ele uma
comunicao intensa. Ou seja, para que essa ordem de conhecimento possa ser
reconhecida, j que ela se legitima no ato da leitura, necessria a cumplicidade de
um sujeito que no olha o mal como estranho, como alteridade, mas sim como uma
possibilidade que o concerne. O leitor assume, nesse caso, uma parceria com o
escritor. [OS PERIGOS DA LITERATURA: EROTISMO, CENSURA E
TRANSGRESSO. Eliane Robert Moraes.pg. 231]
Este foi tambm o caso, prossegue Foucault, das numerosas perverses catalogadas por
psiquiatras, mdicos e outros profissionais. Estas formas diversas de aberrao sexual
foram ao mesmo tempo abertas exibio pblica e transformadas em princpios de
classificao da conduta, da personalidade e da auto-identidade individuais. O propsito
no era terminar com as perverses, mas atribuir-lhes uma realidade analtica, visvel e
permanente; elas foram implantadas nos corpos, furtivamente introduzidas em modos
de conduta indignos. Por isso, na legislao pr-moderna, a sodomia era definida como
um ato proibido, mas no era uma qualidade ou um padro de comportamento de um
indivduo. No entanto, o homossexual do sculo XIX tornou-se um personagem, um
superado, um registro de caso, assim como um tipo de vida, uma forma de vida, uma
morfologia. No devemos imaginar, nas palavras de Foucault,
Que todas estas coisas anteriormente toleradas chamassem a ateno e recebessem uma
designao pejorativa quando a poca acabava de outorgar um papel regulador ao nico
tipo de sexualidade capaz de reproduzir o poder do trabalho e a forma da famlia... Foi
atravs do isolamento, da intensificao e da consolidao das sexualidades perifricas
que as relaes de poder vinculadas ao sexo e ao prazer se espalharam e multiplicaram,
avaliaram o corpo e penetraram nos modos de conduta.
[...]
O sexo tornou-se de fato o ponto principal de um confessionrio moderno. Segundo
Foucault, o confessionrio catlico foi sempre um meio de controle da vida sexual dos
fiis. Envolvia muito mais que apenas as indiscries sexuais, e tanto o padre quanto o
penitente interpretavam a confisso de tais pequenos delitos em termos de uma ampla
estrutura tica. Como parte da Contra-Reforma, a Igreja tornou-se mais insistente em
relao confisso regular, e todo o processo foi intensificado. No apenas os atos mas
tambm os pensamentos, as fantasias e todos os detalhes relacionados ao sexo deveriam
ser trazidos tona e examinados.[pg. 29] A TRANSFORMAO DA INTIMIDADE
Anthony Giddens
Msica